Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/139



DR. AND MRS. PATTERSON IN LYNN—THEIR SEPARATION—MRS. PATTERSON AS A PROFESSIONAL VISITOR—SHE TEACHES HIRAM CRAFTS THE QUIMBY "SCIENCE"—MRS. PATTERSON IN AMESBURY

after Mrs. Eddy's second visit to Quimby in the early part of 1864 she always desired to teach his doctrines and could think and talk of little else, it was not until 1870 that she was able to establish herself as a teacher of metaphysical healing. The six years intervening are important chiefly as the period of Mrs. Eddy's novitiate. During that time she drifted from one to another of half a dozen little towns about Boston; but amid all vicissitudes one thing remained fixed and constant, her conviction that she was the person destined to teach and popularise Quimbyism.

Mrs. Patterson's long visit at the home of Mrs. Sarah Crosby, at Albion, Me., has already been referred to in the fourth chapter of the present volume. She went to Mrs. Crosby's house in May, 1864, remaining there most of the summer and leaving in the early autumn. She then rejoined her husband, Dr. Patterson, at Lynn, Mass., where the doctor had begun to practise and had taken an office at 76 Union Street. In the Lynn Weekly Reporter, of June 11, 1864, the following advertisement appears for the first time: